10 Canned Responses to use in your customer service emails

Canned responses can save support agents keystrokes on each case – saving time, sparing typos, and ensuring consistency in brand voice with a few clicks. They can also preserve mental bandwidth: agents spend their attention on the substance of cases instead of how to phrase responses with the appropriate tone.

For more details regarding Canned response feature and how they compare to out-of-box email templates, refer blog: Quick Email reply to Customer from Case form using Canned Responses. Blog link.

This blog will serve as a cheat sheet for common customer service scenarios and their canned responses for you to refer anytime you need guidance.

#1. Information Request: Dynamics 365 for Customer Service has a self-service knowledge base. This can cut down on case volume by letting customers find answers on their own. However, if answers aren’t easily found, a customer might create a case anyway. The support agent can link to the relevant knowledge base article in their reply; canned responses such as these can be duplicated for the most common support issues.

#2. Giving information about current promotions: If you constantly run various promo campaigns and give special offers to different categories of customers, it may be really handy to create promo descriptions as your canned responses and quickly provide this information. However, please make sure you have this information up to date. We suggest grouping your canned responses in to categories. You can have a separate category for your promo offers. In this case you will quickly find a response in this category and will not need to look for it among other responses.

#3. How to save your links: Definitely you have lots of links you need to provide to your customers. Such links can be, of course, saved as bookmarks in your browser. However, it will be much faster to create a category of canned responses which contains links to your YouTube videos, catalogues or presentations.

#4. Finding a Relevant Expert: If addressing a case in real-time, or to introduce another agent to the case conversation, a canned response addressing the need for outside perspective lets the customer know the company is looking for the best person to resolve their complaint. The message isn’t meaningless; in general, people are more understanding with a transparent process than when they’re left in the dark.

#5. Customer requesting cancellation of Subscription This is a perfect opportunity to get feedback by asking if there’s anything they were looking for that you don’t have! Was there a problem with the product? Is the price too high? Customer feedback is one of the best ways to improve your customer service! Take advantage of every opportunity you have to get it.

#6. Refund Accept: A dissatisfied customer wanting their money back is bound to happen eventually. If their request fits within your refund policy, it’s best to keep your message short and positive. You may have lost the sale, but you need not lose the customer. Even if you do, you can at least spare your brand a few irate social media posts.

#7. Privacy Policy: Customers like to know how their data is secured and whether it’s shared. If data isn’t shared with third parties, this response can be quite short. If data is shared, the customer can be reminded of your privacy policy, and the consent they were obligated to give when they began using your service. Your reply can remind them of this while offering a way out — no one wants to feel their data is being held hostage.

#8. Admitting a mistake: Let’s face it: Sometimes, we screw something up. It’s OK – we’re only human! However, you need to be transparent when making mistakes.

#9 Ticket Update: In a perfect world, support cases would be resolved in a day or two at most. But sometimes persistent cases linger far longer. It’s better to keep your customers notified that effort remains underway towards resolving their issues — even if nothing tangible has been gained. Most customers would like a company that proactively updates them on progress rather than feeling obligated to ask.

#10 Case Closure: Closing customer cases can be tricky sometimes and like all things customer support, nothing is black and white. Some organizations like to wait for the customer to either close the case, or tell the support staff when it is ok to close a case. A canned response for case closure could let the customer know beforehand that their case is being closed and they can revert back anytime if they need to re-open.